About me

On the beginning of 2025, in line with my new year's aspirations, I left Twitter. I chose Mastodon to be my new microblogging home on the web. I was asked why I didn't go for Bluesky. I wanted to give a comprehensive response to this, and here it is.

Ever since my first exposure to "the algorithm" (which was many years ago when facebook switched from the chronologic feed to an algorithmic one) [1], I did not like the experience. I remember, neither did many people and there was a push against it. Facebook later made that the hard-default [2]. IIRC they later removed the chronological timeline as it hurt their business as people were spending less time on facebook that way. This hurt their business because it relies on maximizing the time you spend there. The latter was quite addictive and it beat the purpose for which I was on social media; to connect with people. Instead it became a tool of media consumption.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/facebook-news-feed-timeline_b_2821060

A few months ago, after getting frustrated with a few popular RSS readers online, I decided I could create my own RSS reader (as you do).

My main points of frustration were that; these tools were either completely paywalled, had free tiers that would beg you to get the premium at every chance, or were a pain to operate.

I wanted something that would just get the job done: show me posts from feeds I follow. Give me a clean UI to go through them, be completely free to run and use, and not have any unnecessary distractions.

I have been working as a Software Engineer at Amazon Prime Video in London since May 2022. Job search in the UK as a Turkish citizen can be a quite difficult process, and not many people have visibility into how it works. This document aims to provide context and help to get you started from someone who has been through the process.

Coursemaker is program to parse sentences in a corpus, and sort them in an order ideal for vocabulary study. See github repo for the complete source code.

Most used 100 words in a language make up approximately 50% of words in a corpus (This of course varies from language to language. E.g. it is lover in agglutinative languages). If you sort the most used words and start learning words from this list (frequency sorted list fsl) you can effectively increase your hit rate in the corpus.